Disaster Area

For five days in July of 1995, the city of Chicago baked underneath record temperatures, and behind closed doors people suffered for days - the poor, the elderly, the disabled. By the time the heat wave was over, over 750 people were dead.

Sources can be found at http://disasterareapodcast.wordpress.com/.

• "Airplane!"
• "Airplane II: The Sequel"

• Internet Movie Plane Database - Airplane!
• Bulls vs. Lakers Box Score: March 7th, 1980
• Airplane! script
• Airplane II script

There is always bound to be a first - the first person to climb Mount Everest, the first person to run a four-minute mile, the first woman to become president. But there are terrible firsts, and in this episode we discuss the first major tragedy of the American space race.

Videos:

• Apollo 1 Audio - January 27th, 1967

Articles and books:

• The Astronaut Wives Club, by Lily Koppel
• Apollo 13, by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger
• Deke, by Deke Slayton and Michael Cassutt
• Chasing the Moon, by Robert Stone and Alan Andres
• A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin
• Apollo 1: The Tragedy That Put Us On the Moon, by Ryan S. Walters
• Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations, by Charles D. Benson and William Faherty
• Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, by Courtney Brooks, James Grimwood, and Loyd Swenson
• Apollo 1 report
• Apollo 1: The Fire
• Space Safety Magazine: The Apollo 1 Fire
• 'We have a fire in the cockpit!' The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later
• American Institute of Physics: Trial by Fire: The Legacy of Apollo 1

A man armed with semi-automatic weapons and a livestreaming camera walks into a place full of people he hates and commits a mass murder. It shouldn't be something we see more than once. But now we have.

In which Jennifer describes her visits to disaster sites in New York City last week, including the 9/11 Memorial, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and the 1920 Wall Street bombing.

We all hope that in a moment of great need, we would do the right thing. When the airspace over the United States closed on September 11th, the small town of Gander, Newfoundland, did just that.

In fifteen minutes one Friday in April of 1967, one tornado slashed through the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, leaving dozens dead in its wake. But it wasn't the only tornado to strike the area that afternoon.

It was just supposed to be a typical office training session masked as a Christmas party - the speeches, the boring videos, the slideshows that probably could have been an email. But at 11 AM, everything changed when a person dressed all on black entered the conference room and began shooting. Then it got worse - they weren't alone.

When Hollywood legend Carole Lombard boarded TWA Flight 3 on January 16th, 1942, in Las Vegas, she hoped to be home in only a few short hours. She and the twenty-one other people on board only made it thirty-three miles closer to home.